Posts by David Cornes

BT puts the 'free' back into 'freephone'

www.SayNoTo0870.com

I'll repeat that: www.SayNoTo0870.com

Can't big them up enough! They've saved me a small fortune over the past year or two!

One more time: www.SayNoTo0870.com :-D

Cops taser JCB thief in 'slowest police chase ever'

@"Why did they send an ARU in the first place?"

Maybe 'cos the plods were out doing some work (arresting trafficked paedophile terrorist photographers?), and the tooled-up ones were sat around at the station polishing their glocks again!

Axl Rose may have undermined own case over Dr Pepper stunt

Website crashed

Friggin' H - it's ONE free can of fizzy shite!

Some people must be EXTREMELY hard up to have even bothered to try, let alone complain when they couldn't get the vouchers!

Gov backs campaign to save Scott's Antarctic hut

Museum piece

I think this might attract more attention, and money, if there was a proposal to somehow relocate it to somewhere where more than a few dozen people might ever get to see it?

The Apple Armada - Still worthy of the Jolly Roger?

Shiver me timbers

Surely the Armada would've flown Spanish naval ensignia, not The Jolly Roger?

Brand new Star Trek prequel pics and trailer

Accents

"And for a moment we forget that Simon Pegg couldn't even do an authentic American accent in Band of Brothers"

To be fair that goes for 2/3rds of the (predominantly British) cast of BoB - inc. Damian Lewis, who I see has managed to swing a major part in some new yankeee drama show I can't be arsed to recall the name of...!

Microsoft nobbled ‘Vista-Capable’ for Intel

Radeon 9100 and Ubuntu

"Strange that an AC complains when he tries to force the wrong driver to work on a card it doesn't work."

I install the OS from the distro, it does it's stuff and leaves me with a working but rubbish looking desktop. I said I'm a newbie to the OS, right?? Well I'm comparing that experience with the very similar "Vista Capable" one Intel 915 and other PC users were left with.

And yes you are Penguin smugtards 'cos EVERY article about MS turns up with the same old "shoulda run Linux" pre-recorded message.

Tory MP smacks Labour about the balls

Good investment

I'd guess just ONE business investing in this country is going to be spending a lot more than £12k, so I'd say this was a good deal!

Watchdogs decry Kentucky's 141-site net casino land grab

Two questions

1. Do they have the legal authority over the domain registrars to make this happen?

2. If they stop THE WHOLE WORLD from accessing said domains, do not the domain owners have grounds to sue Kentucky for basically destroying their business, which is legal in a 1000 other places?

US stocks up on semi-automatic rifles

"serious threat to Second Amendment liberties".

Which in a civilised world, is a bad thing how...??

Palin didn't know Africa is a continent, McCain aides say

The idiots in charge

What scares me so much about this woman is, yes she thankfully never became Veep, but she now goes back to her old job of RUNNING A STATE. Fuck me, admittedly not a heavily populated one, but still she'd scare me pouring coffee in a diner!

Regarding Dubya, I heard a cool quote on Newsnight the other night: "forgotten, but not gone" :-D

Sony pitches blue-laser Compact Disc revival

@ Vladimir Plouzhnikov

Thanks Vlad for explaining real high fidelity to the plebs :-)

If reading a CD was so simple why ARE there so many expensive players, using all sorts of esoteric means of improving the audio signal retrieved from the same disc you can put into a £20 ghetto blaster? Try listening to a seriously good hifi system sometime, and you WILL hear the difference.

And yes there probably is also an economic benefit here, but if it means CD manufacturing plants can turn over to Blu Ray production on the same lines, then there may also be a win in bringing down the costs for everyone. Of course pricing of the content has never really been based on the cost to produce the media, so that's all down to us, the buying public, voting with our wallets!

Government Gateway login details found in pub car park

Outsourcing at fault?

"Starting to notice that predominantly this is the private sector (under contract to the Gov) that is losing this data? Thought not, but its true none the less!"

Is that because the PS are inherently incompetent, or simply because pretty much all governmental IT is run by them nowadays?

Having worked for both I have serious doubt a civil service run IT function would be a lot more competent. Accountable maybe...

Putin's dog gets satnav tracker collar

Shuts down when stationary

Great, so if the dog's lying somewhere dead or injured you'll never frikkin' find it??!

Good thinking there comrad!

NZ chaps' sperm not quite up to scratch

Immigration test

Every other bugger I meet nowadays seems to be planning on upping sticks and heading to either Oz or NZ. Maybe the next test they should be adding to the immigration qualifications should be a sperm count?

BMW unwraps electric Mini

@ Why is it...

I'm guessing BMW will lease these rather than sell them to you 'cos they'll need specialist support and servicing, and as it seems to be some kind of trial they'll be wanting to keep a close eye on them over the period - and also have the option to swap it out sharpish if anything unexpected happens!

Assembling the drivetrains in Germany, assembling the finished vehicles in the UK, then operating them in the US... yep that's sure one way to reduce emissions! :-O

Bee Gees belter may help cheat death

Factoid:

The incessant drum beat on Staying Alive is in fact two bars lifted-and-looped from the already recorded Night Fever, brought about by the absence of session drummer Dennis Byron and the unsatisfactory experimentation with drum machines!

NASA's nuclear Mars tank is go

Less waste on Earth, more and more in space?

Agreed, it does seem a damn wasteful way to do things. I'm sure a million scientists could talk me to death with the answer to this, but what exactly are we frikkin' well getting (of actual use!) from all this exploration of Mars? Interesting pictures yep, but otherwise...?

And watching that video of the thing coming in to land, was anyone else reminded of the dropship sequence in Aliens?? "Prepare for immediate dust-off on my mark"! :-D

Daughter cremates mom on improvised barbecue

*More* bizarre??

Keeping a child IMPRISONED UNDER A BED FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS (imagine the psychological trauma of that!) is less bizarre than simply deciding on a home cremation of a naturally deceased relative?

Those yankees..! ;-)

Hubble's 486 back-up springs into life

@ Piers

Windows 3.1 didn't have a Safe Mode (oh that it should have!). It had Real and Protected modes, which related to the way it accessed the CPU and stuff (think DOS vs virtualised modes etc), and possibly a third full 386 instruction compatible one but it's all such a long time ago and I can't be that bothered to Google it.

As for CPU heatsinks, I think they first appeared around the time that the clock doublers (486 DX2s et al) started to arrive...?

Meat Loaf gets Q gong

Good honest reporting

Nice one Sarah ;-) Like it a lot!

HP loads PC with nonexistent web browser

Non-existent?

It sounds funny, but your categarisation of virtualised applications and machines as non-existent is a bit of a misnomer surely? Since ALL software is really just bits of data in transit, running those in a virtual layer instead of within the host operating system isn't really fundamentally changing their state of existence is it??

Orange bundles free HP laptops with HSDPA deals

Buy or rent?

Do you get to keep the laptop at the end of the contract? Or even better do you get punted an upgrade model by Customer Services?? :-)

Gemalto glues DVD onto a SIM

Fucked with any PC with vertical drives

... like mine.

UK.gov told not to subsidise superfast broadband

amanfromMars

Am I the only one who whenever he sees that name skips straight to the next comment, having given up hope of ever understanding a frikkin' word he writes??!

Caterpillar plans 600 tonne godzilla-lorry robots

Big Trak

I have this mental image of these things being programmed by a sodding big plastic keypad on the roof!

..and probably driving smack bang into (well over in this case) the first kitchen door it can find as soon as the GO button is pressed.

Apple channels Pandora with iTunes 8

@ Andy Barrett

"If I create a playlist based on Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, I get Girls Aloud songs recommended to me."

Serve's you right for having Girls Aloud on your iPod! :-D

Digital divide looms again over superfast broadband for all

1Gbit for what?

What is the plan for 1Gbit per house? If anyone replies with "rich multimedia" content, then if that means broadcast content (TV and radio)over IP then why are you effectively duplicating bandwidth already covered by digital television and radio? Otherwise why not bin rolling out/upgrading DAB and digital TV (or at least scale it back) and divert some of the licence fee into this?

7-year-old faces M&S Inquisition

MS muppet

Surely under Parental Responsibility the mother had full right to speak and act on hehalf of her SEVEN YEAR OLD son anyway??

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

Free bundles

On the face of it paying for termination sounds like something I wouldn't like.

But thinking about it, I currently get a 600 free minutes a month package, so that means my provider must be paying the termination fees on the bundled calls to other operators ON MY BEHALF. So if things changed to paying to receive calls, then wouldn't all that would happen is they'd start covering that cost instead/as well?

Phorm: Our business is fine, honest

Opt-in?

I'm curious how TalkTalk intend to pitch such an system if it will indeed be opt-in, what arm twisting will they offer customers in order to allow their web surfing to be sniffled for (TalkTalk's) profit?

Women turn on to a throbbing Maserati

@ Russ Tarbox

An outbreak of acne and a love of loud breakbeat shite I'd imagine.

Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise

Rod for their own back

MS (and Netscape in their day) created this problem by deliberately ignoring standards in favour of their own proprietry implementations, simply to try and maintain market share.

So now they're in something of a hole: imagine the screams if IE8 became standards compliant overnight and 'broke' all the pages they'd spent years cultivating?

Internet Explorer - now with 35% less FAIL

Tabs?

Actually, as a general rule I tend to be against the idea of tabs: you already have a 'tab bar' of sorts with the Windows Task Bar, and it seems logical to continue to use that as a single place to find things rather than creating another one. For that reason I prefer Word and Excel to use separate Task Bar entries for docs. However when Windows starts stacking them into one that can get annoying!

Have to admit though the tabbed browsing first in Opera, and more recently Firefox, is weaning me off this way of thinking. Whether I'll bother with IE8 though after the mess of IE7 pushed me to FF we'll have to see.

Larry Ellison gets huge pay rise

Can never have too much money

It must be a curious kind of greed that drives a man worth $25 BILLION to request an extra $20 million a year in his pay packet.

Then again I guess those fuel and food prices rises hit everyone, and it's not easy making ends meet...

Grazing cattle display animal magnetism

Magnetic alignment?

I have to say the theory does have it's attraction.

Coat with the iron filings in the lining...

Winehouse jibe wins Fringe's funniest gag

Laugh-in

Personally I thought the runner-up was funnier, it's snappier with a nicer rhythm to it. All three are pretty good though!

Myself I've always thought the name Winehouse was too close to a joke to be real (Winos, WHinehouse... take your pick).

Opera update draws the curtain on seven security vulns

Bugfix?

Does it fix the shocking bugs in v9.5x though, including one where the download manager routines loses partially complete downloads between sessions? After reading the forums I ended up reverting to v9.27.

The first time I've ever been bitten by the version upgrade thing with Opera as well, and I've been a user since something like v5.

Royal Navy plans world's first running-jump jet

Good for?

So, like why when the rest of the world just forks out for tried and tested carriers big enough, and the aircraft designed to work on them, do we go for the bodged different approach?

And am I the only one who'll feel just a little bit sad at the sight of the BRITISH Royal Navy flying US warplanes?

Satnav turtle locates cannabis stash

Really??

"he probably never counted on a turtle with a tracking device leading us to that location and finding the field".

Statement of the bleeding obvious methinks! Unless they have some pretty damn comprehensive scenario training at the secret-dope-growers boot camp...

UK MoD tries to resell surplus Eurofighters to India, Japan

@ Graeme

What the frig do Germany, and particularly SPAIN need bloody fighter aircraft for??

A third of Vista PCs downgraded to XP

plus ça change

I tried Vista SP1 (as a dual boot alongside my existing XP installation) a month or so ago. I found it ok enough, and would've put in the effort to learn to use it full-time, but the graphics chipset on the PC (an nVidia 9100 IGP) wasn't supported so I only got the crappy default driver, which was unusable for playing video etc.

So it's gone. I've now fill the empty partition it left with the latest Ubuntu. And guess what? The IGP isn't supported properly by that either... :-(

XP forever!

Microsoft may lift VM licensing restrictions next week

@ Paddy Newman

"Bellend Gates will be stuffed".

Let's see, the guy's worth some 50 billion, has built a worldwide empire/corporation, is now in his fifties and retired from active working, owns lots of property, has a charitable foundation to run... how will he EVER be "stuffed" again??

Did we say you can read that?

The extremists are winning

If you think that one of their aims is to undermine our 'free' society, then by the actions of a very small number of people they've provoked disproportionate reactions from the authorities, effectively slowly but surely turning us all into suspected terrorists, simply based on what we might be reading.

Congrats Bin Laden and co!

Tired of RRoD taunts? Turn your Xbox 360 into a PC

Ugly!

Whilst I'm not necessarily saying the 360 is a great piece of design, that is one UGLY looking mutha! You'd have to be seriously keen to want to have that in your living room :-O

Windows XP crashes out of Olympics?

Off switch?

Are you seriously suggesting no-one in or around the people running the screens thought to turn the frikkin' things off (or somehow blank them) rather than have a big BSoD on show for so long??

Sounds suss to me.

Patched DNS servers still vulnerable to cache poisoning

Critical?

I decided I need to check up on MS patches for this little baby last week. MS08-037 seems to be the one that covers this "gaping hole that bring an end to all of online civilisation" I believe.

So why isn't this offered or even LISTED on Windows Update, for either my XP clients or 2003 server (which runs in-house DNS)??

Kiwi cops hunt teenage serial burglar with head of Robbie Coltrane

Nationalists

English?? Scottish?? I think you'll find Robbie Coltrane's passport (the legal document proving his nationality) states he's BRITISH.

And @ David: I think you'll find the police force in question are New Zealanders and not Australian.

All we need now is for someone to call Canadians Americans... :-D

Carbon Trust: Rooftop windmills are eco own-goal

@ JonB

Y'know it's funny you should mention gyms... it's crossed my mind more than once down my local, packed to the doors with sweaty people and high-tech electric powered machinery, bright lights, air-con, and a pumping sound system, what their electricity bill must be like, and how ironic it is all the energy they're *paying* for so that a load of people can *expend* a lot more energy??!

Gordon Brown's secret life as network admin

Democracy for the masses

So the most popular e-petition is in response to a story that isn't actually true?? Wow, you just gotta love modern tabloid fueled democracy in action.